Such an installation has become known through the German AS No. 11 29 101. There, the bottles are conveyed in two rows in a feed track to a conveyer belt. Above the conveyer belt, a guidance likewise developed in two rows has been disposed which is swivelable around the vertical axis so that as a result of swiveling of this guide, the bottles may be conducted in several tracks disposed side by side and limited by lateral guides and may be lined up there. An essential disadvantage of this known installation consists in the fact that during swiveling of the bottle guide around the vertical axis, there is a danger of bottles striking against the front edge of the lateral guides disposed between the tracks. Because of this danger, the conveying speed of the bottles through the swivelable guide may only be set relatively low in order to avoid any destruction of bottles. As a result of that the performance of the installation is limited. A further disadvantage of this installation consists in the fact that an adjustment for bottles of a different size, especially of a different diameter is possible only at great expense.
It has also been known to feed containers in one row to a shunting shift, shiftable perpendicularly in relation to the path of movement of the containers, the length of which slide corresponds to the desired length of the rows. Whenever the desired length of rows has been shunted, a conveyor belt moves the cask to a machine slide of a packaging machine. However, with such an arrangement, no great performance can be achieved either, since during the shunting of a row, the subsequent containers must be stopped.
The task of the present invention consists in avoiding the inadequacies of the known installations and in creating an installation of the initially mentioned type with which the production of a multirow cask of containers is possible in a simple and uninterrupted manner with a great conveying performance. In addition, the installation is supposed to be convertible with a slight expenditure to different sizes of containers.